The 360fly 4K camera promises to deliver crisp video that covers a 360 degree field of view, but the technology itself has a long way to go.

The 360fly 4K ($499.99) is the company's second-generation 360-degree video camera, upping the resolution from 1080p to a more robust 4K. But even with the extra pixels, video still looks soft when stretched out for interactive playback, and you don't get a true spherical video frame as you do with dual-lens models like the Samsung Gear 360. Add in some unfortunate video artifacts, including heavy purple color fringing in brightly lit scenes and very grainy footage in dim conditions, coupled with an internal mic that makes voices sound distant and hollow, and you have a product that needs a bit more work to be ready for the mainstream. The 360fly 4K does have a strong mobile companion app, but you'll get video that's slightly better and superior audio capture from the Kodak Pixpro SP360 4K.

DesignThe 360fly 4K is a 2.6-inch, 6-ounce, black spheroid with a flat bottom, angled edges, and a bulbous glass lens. The exterior is soft to the touch, but easily gripped for handheld shooting, and a standard tripod mount sits at the base. An adapter to use standard GoPro mounts is included.

There are no traditional data ports. Instead, the magnetized flat base has a series of data connectors. It sits securely in a desktop dock, which connects to a Mac or PC via USB. A micro USB cable is included. There is a single button that does double duty for power and recording. Holding it down for a couple seconds powers the camera up or down, while a shorter press starts and stops recording. The camera vibrates with haptic feedback to let you know that your command has been recognized.

Two LED indicator lights—one around the button and another ringing the base—change color to let you know what's happening with the camera. Blue indicates that it's looking for connection to a smartphone, green tells you that it's connected to a phone, red tells you that it's recording, and yellow tells you that it's connected to a computer via USB.

Memory is internal, and there's plenty of it—64GB. A minute of 4K footage uses about 375MB of space, so you can expect to store about 3 hours of footage. The internal battery is good for about an hour and a half of recording per charge.

The camera is protected against dust and splashes, so you can take it out and use it at the beach or in the rain. It's rated with 1 ATM of water resistance, which means that you can submerge it to 30 feet (10 meters).

SoftwareWhere software is one of the weakest points of the Kodak Pixpro SP360 4K, it's a stronger draw with the 360fly 4K. The mobile app, which works with Android and iOS devices and utilizes both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for communication with the camera, streams a live feed to your handset and also includes editing tools.

Once you've downloaded clips to your phone (over Wi-Fi) you can mark segments that'd you like to share—they're marked in green on the playback timeline—and click a button to assemble them into a single clip. It's akin to old-school linear editing tools. It's easy to understand, even for shooters who don't have experience with editing software, and is a good way to share quick selections.

After editing your clips, you can push them to 360fly's site, Facebook, or YouTube for sharing. The app also has a cardboard , which splits video into to windows so you can view it in a VR headset, right from your phone's screen.

The desktop software, available for Mac and Windows systems, isn't quite as robust. It offers editing tools that make it easy enough to trim selections out of and later merge clips together. But if you're trying to do anything more complicated than selecting a few segments for sharing, you'll want to turn to a dedicated editing suite like Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Adding a simple timeline-based editing system would eliminate that hassle.

The desktop app also allows you to share video to 360fly's own video service, YouTube, and Facebook. There is an advantage to sharing via 360fly—you can still embed on Web sites and share links, as you can with and empty black area that shows up in 360-degree video visible.

Video QualityUnfortunately, the weakest link of the 360fly 4K is video. If you're expecting immersive footage that has the same crispness and detail as that captured by a flat 4K camera, you're going to be disappointed. When viewed in its native, circular format the footage is very crisp through most of the frame, but edges that show blurred details. You can record 4K (2,880-by-2,880 pixels) at 24 or 30fps, and if you're willing to deal with lower resolution video you can set the camera to 1,728 by 1,728 pixels to capture video at 60fps. The Kodak doesn't have as much resolution when shooting at 60fps (1,440 by 1,440 pixels), and it doesn't offer the 24fps capture that you can get with the 360fly 4K.

That's the same story as the Kodak SP360 4K, but there are differences between the two cameras in terms of video quality. Center details appear a bit sharper with the 360fly, but purple fringing is much more evident—it pops up in areas of high contrast throughout the frame, even toward the center. Dynamic range is limited; in a scene shot in the shadowed canopy of trees, the sky poking through the leaves is blown out. You can dial down the exposure to prevent highlights from blowing out, you'll just need to bring up shadows using desktop color correction tools to bring out underexposed details. In low the 360fly 4K shows quite a bit of grain and detail suffers noticeably.

When is stretched out for viewing in a format compatible with 360-degree video players it is noticeably soft. Details simply aren't that crisp. The footage starts out as a sphere inscribed in a 2,880 by 2,800 square. Software stretches it to a 2:1 widescreen frame, 3,840 by 1,920 pixels. The bottom third is black, so you're dealing with video that's closer to 3,840 by 1,280 pixels—just 200 more lines of resolution than flat 1080p footage.

Audio is a big disappointment. The 360fly's waterproof design requires its microphone to be just a pinhole. I set up the camera in a room with little background noise to record a casual conversation between three people. Voices sounded hollow and distant, a big disappointment when you consider that there's no way to connect an external microphone. The Kodak, recording the same conversation from the same location picked up voices loud and clear.

ConclusionsLike its closest competition in the marketplace, the Kodak SP360 4K, the 360fly 4K shows room for improvement. Both cameras record video that appears soft when viewed in a 360-degree and both show issues with dynamic range. At times the 360fly appears to show details that are just a hair crisper, but it also exhibits a lot more purple color fringing, and audio is hollow and distant.

We'll have to see if dual-lens solutions, like the Samsung Gear 360 and the Nikon KeyMission 360 (set for release later this year) do a better job in terms of video resolution For now, understand that 360-degree is an emerging technology, and the quality just isn't on the same level as you expect from a camera that records flat 4K footage, like a GoPro, can manage. If you're an early adopter and want to play with the storytelling tools provided by the format, the 360fly 4K does have some advantages—it can be used underwater in shallow depths, and its software package is much better than what you get with the SP360 4K. But both cameras represent a technology that has a lot of room to grow.

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About the Author

Senior digital camera analyst for the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team, Jim Fisher is a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he concentrated on documentary video production. Jim's interest in photography really took off when he borrowed his father's Hasselblad 500C and light meter in 2007. He honed his writing skills at re... See Full Bio

360fly 4K

360fly 4K

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